Welcome!

Usually when people get a facelift, they don’t talk about it. But I’m proud to say I’ve spent the last several days giving my blog an overhaul even Joan Rivers would envy.

First, if you followed me over from my WordPress.com blog, thank you for making the switch. Please adjust your bookmarks and links accordingly if you had me in your blogroll. And don’t forget to re-subscribe (look to sidebar on right) because your subscription to the other blog is now defunct.

This site is a work in progress—it’s only about 25% finished—because I’m no tech wizard and too cheap and stubborn to pay someone to do it. The past few days I’ve felt like a chimp playing the roulette wheel, having just as much chance of clicking on the wrong thing as not.

Speaking of clicking, I hope you’ll do so all over the site and explore it (check out that carousel of featured articles on the home page!).

I added a “top commentator” widget which keeps track of people who leave the most comments. Jen Forbus is currently in the lead; are you just going to let her stay there? Occasionally, I’ll give prizes to the most vocal readers so now’s a good time to de-lurk yourself.

But I don’t want you only commenting on what I write about. I also added a forum so you all can hang out here and discuss anything you’d like. Share your pop culture recommendations, swap books, tell nerdy stories—click on the tab up top and have fun!

Enough yammering—I can hear the orchestra playing me off the stage. I’d like to say a special thank you to le0pard13, who provided superhuman support, and to my husband who allowed me to lock myself in the den for hours and slipped food under the door just when I needed it.

34 Comments »

More power to you for doing all the tech stuff yourself! Maybe some day I’ll get around to learning how to do more of that for myself, but until then my husband is my tech guru. Besides, it’s less stressful for him to do it than to listen to my sailor’s version of tech-speak when things aren’t working the way I planned.

Thanks, Christine! So happy to see you here. In making the move, I had to accept that I’d lose all my stats, site rankings and some subscribers. I feel like a baby learning to walk all over again so a friendly face is much appreciated!

The first one used the cite HTML tag. The second, the blockquote tag. I messed up stating this in the previous reply because the ” are reserved for embedding them (and won’t show normally). You can see the list of allowed tags below the comment entry field. The previous template/WordPress site only allowed bold</b, italic, and link tags. Hope this makes sense. Thanks.

But if you’re excited with some blogoshere mechanics, pad away! I am Padawan to your Obi-Wan. Of course, I’ll probably need my husband to translate exactly why it is that you’re tickled with it and how to use it! Ha!

I don’t just claim to know so little, it’s the sad truth. Up until 48 hours ago, I didn’t know jack about all those acronyms—CSS, RSS, XML, PHP, HTML, etc. And I still don’t. I read something that told me to “make scripts and cache folders writable, changing its permission to CHMOD 777.” What the huh?! To make it worse, when I Googled tutorials, most of them didn’t take Mac users into account.

But I look at it as a painful challenge that I’ll feel good about when I finish, probably sometime in June! Plus, maybe I’ve learned a few things and will be able to help a certain someone in revamping her blog. lp13 gave me great support so I’d like to pay it forward if I can.

I will gladly accept any and ALL help on my own revamp. I did put in a scrolling list yesterday and did a little happy dance when I got it to work. – Christine’s husband helped me do that! 🙂 But that blasted header is still making me absolutely crazy!!!

And lp13, I need you to show me how to hyperlink in a comment! I can bold and italicize, but I don’t know how to do the hyperlink!

Thanks, Naomi! That means a lot to me. My eyes are crossed, my legs have gone numb due to too many hours in front of the computer, I don’t know what day it is, but it makes me happy you think it looks good.

Phew ~ I’m very impressed, PCN! Your new site is gorgeous and a huge pat on the back for doing it yourself. If I didn’t know for sure that you don’t normally mess around with websites, I’d think you were kidding about not knowing anything about it. What an achievement! And how awesome of leOpard13 for the support {I think a little ‘number padding’ can be overlooked in this case 😉 }. Bravo!!! {Standing ovation…}

Wow, well done, PCN!!!
Your new website is beautiful, pleasant and modern!
Looks very professional actually.
This is a great job, especially for someone who’s not a techie.
(As for me, I think I wouldn’t even dare to take up such a challenge!)
Man, you’re someone!!
Oh, and I can see I’m among the top commentators, hey, how cool!

I am so impressed! I tried to set up a blog and a classroom blog for all of my students. After three solid days of screaming, cursing and throwing objects, my husband would not slip anything under the door for me except for, perhaps, some kind of chemical agent that would knock me out and shut me up! I finally surrendered. Blogs too hard for technidiot like me! Yours is bee-you-tee-ful!

I did all those things—cursing, throwing things, screaming, plus pulling out hair, throwing myself on the couch and beating my fists, kicking over chairs—only I condensed them into two days instead of three.

Thanks for saying nice things about the site. I guess the stomach ulcer was worth it!